


The Overflow

by whereismygarden



Series: Ceremonials [3]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-05
Updated: 2013-06-05
Packaged: 2017-12-14 00:34:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/830656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whereismygarden/pseuds/whereismygarden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Belle leaves the Dark Castle, only to stumble into a much darker bargain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Overflow

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by Florence + the Machine's "What the Water Gave Me."  
> "She's a cruel mistress, and a bargain must be made, but oh my love don't forget me, I let the water take me."  
> NOTE: this fic has a mention of non-con and an instance of animal abuse.

The Queen’s workroom is pristine, marble slabs and finely polished grinding stones. Her bottles are the finest glass, and she keeps all her herbs and chemicals in white ceramic jars, labeled in her loopy, clear script. Her knives hang on the walls, gleaming silver and bronze, and she keeps ink, quills, and parchment always on hand. Chalk and towels rest in neat boxes along the wall. Wide windows and fine beeswax candles keep everything bright and glittering.

                Rumpelstiltskin’s workroom was messy to Belle’s eyes. Sheets of parchment covered half his tables, crammed with his spidery, messy writing, and herbs hung in bundles from the ceiling, swinging perilously in the slightest breeze. The shutters were usually cracked, and her master worked in the stripes of light that fell over his tables. Wooden shelves lined the walls, piled with books, jars of odd substances, and his precious, bottled spells. The floor was pitted with stains and pockmarks from sorcery and caustic spills.

                Belle likes neither, though Regina’s bothers her more. Maybe because she can recall, so easily, the look of things spread out over the benches, the slick lashings of blood and puddles of ichor. She doesn’t know whether Rumpelstiltskin butchers beasts for their hearts and livers and bones—she guesses he does—but he doesn’t in his workroom, she is sure. The air smelled like paper and grass, not blood. No matter how much Belle scrubs at the counters, till they shine, pure as river water, she can never get the smell of blood out of her nose.

                _The Queen is smiling at her locked in the cart, hands wrapped deliberately around the bars. Belle looks her in the eye, seething with rage at this woman who spoke with her as a friend, all in the effort of destroying Rumpelstiltskin._

_“You’re an intelligent young woman, I like to see that. So I’ll give you a choice: a better one than the Dark One gave you.” Belle narrows her eyes, wishes for her dagger._

_“A choice?” The Queen’s red-painted mouth twists in amusement, her black-lacquered nails tapping at the wood of the cart._

_“Indeed.”_

_“Speak,” she says, in a tone she learned from Rumpelstiltskin, low and long and hissing. The Queen only smiles wider at it._

_“You can become my prisoner, and I’ll take your bloody body in front of Rumpelstiltskin and cut your throat at his feet, or you can become my assistant, and I’ll have your aid in any magic I wish to do.”_

_“I don’t know any magic,” she whispers, heart thudding against her ribs, the matter-of-factly stated threat turning her blood cold with fear._

_“You will.”_

Belle jerks awake in her bed, sweat making her nightdress stick to her skin. Shivering, she jerks it off and staggers to the bowl of water on her nightstand. A pass of her hand over the water, and it’s warm. She wipes herself off, rinses the salt and stickiness from her hair, and dresses. The sky outside her small window is turning grey: sunrise is not far off. It’s a special day: she leaves her hand unbound, curling around her shoulders, and leaves aside the clothes the Queen provided her. Her blouse, leggings, and jerkin will serve her well enough today.

                “Good morning, Belle,” the Huntsman says to her when she passes him on the stairs, heading to the Queen’s rooms: he is heading away. She stops him with a hand on his wrist and smiles as best as she can.

                “Good luck,” she tells him, feeling pity and disgust rise in her throat. It is a day for mercy. “She has your heart, not your mind.” He frowns—usually she keeps her comments to observations about the weather, and the state of the Queen’s temper—and opens his mouth to ask her, but she hurries on up, ignoring him.

                The Queen is wearing her usual black, with violet accents, and is smoothing her fingers over the sleeping curse, one of her prized apples in her hand, half-eaten.

                “Regina,” she says coldly, and the Queen raises her eyebrows.

                “Disrespectful,” she responds, studying her nails, which are impeccable midnight black, as always. Belle smiles slightly and goes over to the rows of herbs.

                “What do we need for today?” Time to get down to business. She runs her finger over the jaw labeled ‘yew,’ shaking her head.

                _The first thing the Queen has her do is clean up after one of her ‘projects.’ The counters are stained with blood, even the tiled floor, and the jars have all been jumbled up, the labeled lids tossed every which way. The Evil Queen had been in a hurry, doing whatever she was doing. Belle almost laughs at the sight. She spent her first days in the Dark Castle scrubbing blood off the aprons Rumpelstiltskin wore to torture his thief. The counters are gleaming in no time, everything neat and the crumbs of plants brushed into a wicker basket._

_The Queen shows her how to call fire, heat water, determine purity, cool compounds. All useful things, to help her in her work. Some of her spells require more energy than she can provide, and Belle spends the weeks after those staggering around, heavy lidded and exhausted to the point of stupidity. The first time the Queen has her present while she does one of her bloody experiments, Belle has to swallow vomit back down her burning throat: the woman pulls out the heart, and holds it in one hand while she uses a knife to pluck out other organs. The bird—an eagle—screeches and slams its wings against the table, and Belle bites down as hard as she can on her arm._

_The second time, it’s a large, lizard-like beast, and Regina gives the heart to Belle to hold._

_“Think it still,” the Queen orders, hands covered in her heavy black gloves, and she picks a thick, serrated knife from the wall. She throws up this time, tears turning her vision to a black, white, red, and green blur. She can’t see, but she suspects the Queen gives her a scornful look. She’s going to be cleaning up everything anyway, why shouldn’t she be allowed to throw up?_

“I need the apple seeds, and the violets,” the Queen is holding her hand over the curse, the shimmer of magic around her, sifting through its qualities. “And the wormwood, and poppy, and…” She shudders, squeezing her eyes tight shut, and Belle wonders if she should pick up one of the knives she has scrubbed clean so many times and drive it through the Queen’s heart. “The cypress!” she finishes, chest heaving. Belle brings all the jars and watches the Queen’s white hands mix them: careful, steady, unhurried. Her brown eyes are narrowed in concentration. Belle wonders how much of her poise is false, what demons lurk within her skull.

                Her own fears are climbing up her throat, and she pushes them down: mercy over fear. That much she can do for him.

                “You were a lucky find,” the Queen says, gesturing for mortar and pestle. Belle fetches them, and the Queen pours in the wormwood stems. “So brave.” Belle curls her lip, determined to ignore the mocking words. “So much love. Young women have that, overflowing. Lucky for me.” Her voice is languid, lazy, as if she sits lounging on a throne, though she keeps her eyes focused on her work.

                The river is not far from the castle, and they go by carriage, the curse inside the Queen’s gloved hand, the herb mixture in the bottom of a bowl, and a basket of the finest apples Belle’s ever seen on the bench next to the Queen.

                “How could you find love for him?” she asks Belle, as if on this day, her rude questions are suddenly acceptable. “Humor me.”

                “I’m not sharing something private with you. The situation isn’t making me long for someone to spill my secrets to.” The Queen shakes her head and laughs her insincere laugh, though she really wants to know. Belle can tell; she desperately wants to understand, for the sake of understanding and for anything she might use against Rumpelstiltskin.

                It’s a lie she tells the Queen: she does long for someone to spill her secrets to. One person, and the only thing she has to say is _Remember me_ , because he knows she loves him. But he has innumerable lifetimes, and she does not want to be a flicker in his, for her sake and his. She wants to be a blaze, a fire that follows the thread of his life, though it is not likely. He will lie and cover up her love with fear, drown the memory of their kiss in falsehood.

                Which of them deserves more pity, now? She isn’t sure.

                _Belle is under the Queen’s protection, to an extent. The soldiers, in their face-stealing helmets, do not touch her, but sometimes they jeer, because they know she does not really have the Queen’s affection. The Queen’s bed-warmer, the Huntsman, is courteous, but unwilling to even speak to the other soldiers, and Belle sees in his eyes that his will is enslaved. Once, one of the sergeants, bored with his duty of standing on the wall and scanning the ground before it, grabs her arm and gropes at her breast, but she jabs him sharply in the gut, reverting to her knowledge gained on her travels, forgetting his heavy mail._

_The Queen hears her shriek, somehow, and nearly chokes the man to death, rage all over her face._

_“Don’t touch what isn’t yours,” she hisses, lip twitching, and lets him drop. Belle is shaken, confused by her defense, and the Queen takes her arm roughly. “Guard yourself, Belle,” she orders sharply. “I need you a maiden.”_

_She is safe from unwelcome hands, from hunger and cold, but she is starved for kindness. She eats finely cooked food and sleeps in a warm bed, but she’d take her first cot in the cell and her inexpertly baked bread for a single word with him._

                The river is freezing cold: Belle withdraws her fingers from it and wipes them on her dress. The Queen puts the bowl of herbs down at the water’s edge. It’s not far from Belle’s foot, and her leg twitches, without her consent.

                “Right in front of him,” the Queen says, without inflection. “So he can see the light drain out of your eyes.” Belle nods.

                “You’ve reminded me often enough.” Hardly a week goes by without a cold-voiced repetition of the one threat that means something, and she’s been with the Queen for long months. Less time than she’d spent with Rumpelstiltskin, she knows, though it feels like so much more. She feels she’s been washing blood off Regina’s benches and knives in her bright palace half her life, and her time sweeping floors and doing laundry in the Dark Castle has blurred into a golden-black shadowed memory that is not nearly enough time at all.

                “It’s about time,” the Queen says, eyes merciless, and Belle’s stomach clenches. Mercy over fear, she reminds herself, but she shakes anyway. She closes her eyes when the Queen picks up her knife, trying to fix Rumpelstiltskin’s face in front of her eyes. His face when he caught her, in its softness and surprise. “I need this curse.”

                Mercy, mercy, mercy over fear. The water is deep here, fast and perfectly clear.

                Belle jumps, off the bank, and tries not to take a breath as she goes under, but habit takes over and she sucks in air mid-leap. The cold of the water forces it out anyway, and she sinks in her heavy clothes to the riverbed, the pressure of the water heavier than she expected.

                She can hear the Queen chanting over her, and she reaches out and grips some of the stones on the bottom, anchoring herself and feeling the current tug her hair down, pull at the tips of her boots.

                The bowl of herbs is upended over her, and she watches the fragments settle over her for a brief moment, then swirl and jerk away, downstream.

                “Eternal sleep,” she hears the Queen cry above her, the dark cloud of her magic casting a shadow over Belle’s place in the river. Her lungs start to burn, and bubbles pour out of her mouth. She can’t swim up, even if she were to try: there’s a pressure of magic over her, in the cold, darkening water.

                “Maiden’s blood.” The rush of the river is louder than the Queen, now, and the burn is in her head as well as her lungs. Her vision is grey at the edge, colors brightening and darkening in the water.

                The rush of water into her lungs is the way a stab must feel. She reaches one hand up, not in supplication to the Queen, but in some gesture to her love. _Don’t forget._

                Her vision clears, and the pain in her lungs lessens, and the water feels like an embrace. Her fingers let go of the rocks, and she is ready to flow downstream, dissolve into the river.

                She’s dying, she thinks for a moment, fearlessly, trying to hold love before her, searching for his face. Mercy, mercy, mercy, and peace and love flow over her like the current.


End file.
